And it's really nice to see people making some noise about it, it eases my sinking feeling that users have been abandoning slack lately.

I have used Linux since 2001 and I just moved to Slack from Debian within the past year and I couldn't be happier. I actually have seen somewhat of a resurgence of Slack users, and according to the linuxcounter stats, Slack is still the distro with the 3rd or 4th largest reported usage, so I think there is a very large Slackware user base that is not going anywhere anytime soon.